“It’s okay,” he said. “I’m not hungry, so talk.” I had never heard him say, “It’s okay,” before. Restaurant work was corrupting Estevan’s perfect English.
I took his statement to mean that it was okay to talk about things that weren’t especially important, so I did. “Lou Ann took the baby over to her mother-in-law’s for some kind of a weekend-long reunion,” I said, swallowing too much beer. “They still consider her part of the family, but of course she won’t go over when Angel’s there so they have to work it all out, but now of course it’s easier since Angel’s left town. It’s totally nuts. See, they’re Catholic, they don’t recognize divorce.” I felt my face go red. “I guess you’re Catholic too.”
But he wasn’t offended. “More or less,” he said. “Catholic by birth.”
“Did you have any idea she was going to do this?”
“No. I don’t know.”
“There’s not a thing you could have done, anyway. Really.” I swept the carrot pieces into a plastic bag and put it in the refrigerator. “I knew this kid in high school, Scotty Richey? Everybody said Scotty was a genius, mainly because he was real quiet and wore these thick glasses and understood trigonometry. He killed himself on his sixteenth birthday, just when everybody else was thinking, “Well, now Scotty’ll learn to drive and maybe get a car and go out on dates,’ you know, and that his complexion was bound to clear up and so forth. Bang, they find him dead in a barn with all these electrical wires strung around his neck. In the paper they said it was an accident but nobody actually believed that. Scotty had done probably five hundred different projects with electricity for 4-H.”
“Four-H?”
“It’s a club for farm kids where you raise lambs or make an apron or wire a den lamp out of a bowling pin, things like that. I never was in it. You had to pay.”
“I see.”
“Do you want to sit in the living room?” I asked him. He followed me into the other room and I scooted Snowboots off the sofa. When Estevan sat down next to me my heart was bumping so hard I wondered if I was going to have a heart attack. Just what Estevan needed would be another woman falling apart on him.
“So nobody could understand about Scotty,” I said. “But the way I see it is, he just didn’t have anybody. In our school there were different groups you would run with, depending on your station in life. There were the town kids, whose daddies owned the hardware store or what have you-they were your cheerleaders and your football players. Then there were hoodlums, the motorcycle types that cut down trees on Halloween. And then there were the rest of us, the poor kids and the farm kids. Greasers, we were called, or Nutters. The main rule was that there was absolutely no mixing. Do you understand what I mean?”
“Yes,” he said. “In India they have something called the caste system. Members of different castes cannot marry or even eat together. The lowest caste is called the Untouchables.”
“But the Untouchables can touch each other?”
‘Yes.”
“Then that’s it, exactly. The Nutters were the bottom of the pile, but we had each other. We all got invited to the prom and everything, from inside our own group. But poor Scotty with his electricity and his trigonometry, he just didn’t belong to any group. It was like we were all the animals on Noah’s ark that came in pairs, except of his kind there was only the one.”
It struck me how foolishly I was chattering about something that was neither here nor there. Mama would call this “rattling your teeth.” I drank about half my beer without saying another word.
Then I said, “I could kind of see it with Scotty, but Esperanza had somebody. Has somebody. How could she want to leave you? It’s not fair.” I realized I was furious with Esperanza. I wondered if he was too, but didn’t dare ask. We sat there in the shadowy living room thinking our thoughts. You could hear us swallowing beer.
Then out of the clear blue sky he said, “In Guatemala City the police use electricity for interrogation. They have something called the ‘telephone,’ which is an actual telephone of the type they use in the field. It has its own generator, operated by a handle.” He held up one hand and turned the other one in a circle in front of the palm.
“A crank? Like the old-fashioned telephones?”
“Operated with a crank,” he said. “The telephones are made in the United States.”
“What do you mean, they use them for interrogation? Do you mean they question you over the telephone?”
Estevan seemed annoyed with me. “They disconnect the receiver wire and tape the two ends to your body. To sensitive parts.” He just stared at me until it hit me like a truck. I felt it in my stomach muscles, just the way I did when I realized that for nearly an hour I had been in the presence of Newt Hardbine’s corpse. There is this horrible thing staring you in the face and you’re blabbering about bowling-pin lamps and 4-H.
“I’ll get us another beer,” I said. I went to the kitchen and brought back the rest of the six pack, carrying it by
